Based on a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, this film focuses on the life
of a Holocaust Survivor, Herman Broder, who awakens at the beginning of the
film from a nightmare of the Holocaust reality where he is found in a barn
by the SS, and senses his impending doom. He awakens from this nightmare
into the indecision, conflict and inner turmoil of a life in which he cannot
achieve a fulfilling, close, monogamous relationship. Without having sufficiently
mourned the death of his two children, only sporadically taking the photograph of them from the drawer and bringing it to his lips, he lives, or rather survives, in a limbo state between life and death: "I am not alive and I am not dead." Without being able to move through the difficult labor of mourning or Trauerarbeit as it
has been articulated in Freud's essay of 1917 Mourning and Melancholia, Broder wanders aimlessly the three women in his life and the three boroughs of New York: Tamara, his first wife who returns from the dead of Eastern Europe, Masha, a fellow survivor, and his new wife, Jedwiga, the polish peasant who saved him from the Nazis. The
"return from the dead" of his first wife, Tamara, makes this sense of
"living dead" palpable, and she quickly recognizes his plight and proposes
that he end this form of life by making her his "manager." However,
internally broken, ravaged by a past that cannot be bewältigt
(overcome; mastered) and not even aufgearbeitet (worked through),
Broder exhibits a wound that cannot be managed, a past trauma that defies
healing and never ceases never ceasing to disrupt and explode his presence,
as is clear in the fantasy scenes in which he regresses and replays his
skirmish with death.

In a recent article, Anton Kaes has written: "We also have become perturbed
by the unabashed commercial exploitation and trivialization of human suffering
as exemplified in such television specials as Playing for Time and
War and Remembrance, or in such films as Sophie's Choice and
Enemies, A Love Story -- films in which the Holocaust serves more often
than not as a mere backdrop to melodramatic private affairs."
(Anton Kaes, "Holocaust and the End of History: Postmodern Historiography in
Cinema," in: Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits
of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 1992): 206-222, here p. 208). In the following, I hope to
show that Enemies does not employ the Holocaust as a fetish, and that
the Shoah is not a mere "backdrop" to melodramatic private affairs in this film, but rather constitutes the objective
structure in terms of which love and desire are played out in the economy of
trauma and loss. In this regard, Enemies is far more complex than Kaes allows, and cannot be compared to television renderings of war and suffering mentioned in his argument.

Herman Broder's love is fractured, split, fragmented, as he himself is. His love for
Jedwiga is governed by the debt of guilt - a Schuld or debt-guilt
that he cannot repay. His love for Masha is an obsession guided by the
passion for a lost, eroticized mother, for an ecstatic pleasure that
would extinguish his horrible memories and erase the trauma of the loss
of his family. Finally, the love of his wife gradually turns into a
friendship where real compassion and understanding become possible, but
only at the expense of excluding any real committment; as his "advisor" or
"manager," she can counsel him regarding the proper response to his other
relationships, but she cannot really be with him. Despite the significant
differences between his relations to each of these women, his character
shows the dynamic of the moral masochist, who is marked by what Arnold
Cooper defines as "[...]the preferential persuit of suffering and rejection
with little positive achievement."

Sacher-Masoch invented the literary character of the Masochist in the 1870s,
Krafft-Ebing codified the behaviour of the masochist for us in his famous
Psychopathia Sexualis at the end of the 19th century, and Sigmund
Freud gave us one of the most insightful analyses of the masochistic character
in his papers of 1919 and 1924, A Child is being Beaten and The Economic Problem of Masochism. However, the linkage I am interested in here, that between masochism and
narcissism, beautifully displayed in the character of Masha played by
Lena Olin, has only recently been made plain. The narcissist, according
to Freud's famous essay On Narcissism: An Introduction,
exists in the closed circuitry of inward cathexsis, can sometimes thrive
on a false sense of grandiosity, and often exploits others, pulling them
into this inflated sense of self, in which case the feeding frenzy usually
turns on them. And this is precisely what occurs in Herman Broder's
masochistic relationship to the narcissist-masochistic Masha. That this
is not genuine love is written in plain text. When Tamara asks Broder if
he loves Masha, he replies: "I cannot live without her."

Broder's melancholia finds its most explicit description in Freud's essay
of 1919 Mourning and Melancholia, where Freud distinguishes between the
mourning of loss and the entrance into the withdrawn depression that
characterizes melancholia. In this decisive essay, Freud wrote:

"As we have seen, however, melancholia contains something
more than normal mourning. In melancholia, the relation
to the object is no simple one; it is complicated by
the conflict due to ambivalence. The ambivalence is either
constitutional, i.e. is an element of every love relation
formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely
from those experiences that involved the threat of losing
the object. For this reason, the exciting causes of
melancholia have a much wider range than those of mourning,
which is for the most part occasioned only by a real loss
of the object, by its death. In melancholia, countless
separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which
hate and love contend with each other."

The blockage that characterizes melancholia, obstructing the repressed
memories from consciousness and eventually setting the ego on a closed, narcissistic path is equally present in
in both Herman and Masha, but I would claim that Masha has the additional
burden of a malignant narcissism, a defense structure that Herman has somehow
escaped by virtue of his albeit belated, intermittant, and partial conscious
recollection and reworking of his past trauma, specifically, the conscious
remembrance of the loss of his children.

Masha embodies the masochistic-narcissism of an individual totally locked
within the self-consuming, or, as Freud would have put it, "dammed-up"
logic of an unresolved dependency and attachment to her mother, who also
survived the extermination camps, and whom Herman calls by her proper
name: "Mother." Mazursky dwells on this endlessly self-reflective and
self-consuming logic cinematographically in a series of "mirror" scenes
in which Masha is constantly trying to shore up or validate herself or,
more specifically, her physical beauty. In a last, desperate measure, Masha
externalizes this narcissistic pathology with the phantasm of a baby who would
reflect this beauty and privilege back to herself and thereby replace the mirror
function to which she appears addicted. After the phantasm is revealed as such --
the doctor states that the pregnancy was "only in her mind" -- Masha's ego
is running on empty: "I have no feelings left." The "hemorrage" she suffers
physically is the exact, external analogue of her internal depletion, the
aperture of a wound emptying out any real love, concern, or care when the
image in the mirror on the wall does not answer that she is the fairest
of them all. With the actual death of her mother, Masha suffers the final
narcissistic wound that proves fatal. As she herself states: "I cannot
leave my mother. I want a grave next to her's." The double mirror scenes
in which Masha glimpses this emptied out shell mirror precisely this
double grave; mother and daughter locked together in a fatal
symbiotic embrace. Herman opts out of the suicide pact with Masha when
he ascertains that Masha had slept with her ex-husband to get a divorce and
that shewas capable of lying at the very moment she swore on the life of
her unborn child. Herman lacks this malignant narcissism, and still places certain limits on what constitutes
truth, and trust. As Masha states: "You are still afraid of God." With the
last "abandonment" or "betrayal" after her mother's death, Masha's truly
destructive, masochistic pathology now comes fully into its own.
After taking the sleeping pills, the camera returns to the mirror in
a chilling last look at the narcissistic-masochistic personality.

At the end of Enemies, A Love Story, we have only the face of Herman's
newborn child, a child that he had with Jedwiga -- appropriately named "Masha" as well --
as our legacy, a face that is inevitably split between innocence, youth,
hope, and love on the one hand, and the horrifying trace of her dead namesake
Masha on the other. The ferris wheel -- aptly designated the "wonder" wheel --
leaves this naming fully ambivalent, as Mazursky leaves the question open as
to whether it is a circle of life, or, according to a more postmodern reading, a Nietzschean endless repetition of the same. It is one of the powerful images in the film that allows itself to be interpreted either way, and this ambivalence signals the entire structure of desire and love in the wake of the Holocaust. Mazursky and Singer did not invent the
narcissistic-masochistic character, but Enemies, A Love Story has given
us one of the most precise and enduring performances of this pathology and
its disastrous effects, and a "love story" that is anything but that, one that
disturbs the sentimentalized and nostalgiac representation of love after the Holocaust.